Day 19 – It’s That Time of Year November 22, 2009

So my mother came to visit for the weekend, as I said before. We had a nice visit, and she bought me an air freshener because The Ranch smells like “dog.” That’s what happens when you adopt a yard dog and make it an inside dog.

We ate our favorite BBQ on Thursday, pizza on Friday, Saturday we didn’t eat much of anything (more on that later). Today I ate grits, tuna, and pizza. I’m like an Italian who lives on the South’s coast.

So we didn’t eat much on Saturday because we went to a wedding. I didn’t know the people getting married, but they were our relatives, so we went.

I wore a dress that actually fit, looked decent, and best of all, I didn’t feel like a beached whale in it. I didn’t have the feeling that everyone was staring at me, and I just felt like I looked pretty good.

We went in and the bridesmaids were all standing there ready to proceed or whatever, and of course my scatterbrained mother decided to commit to walking in quickly ahead of them, and that just made me feel weird, especially because of the fact that there was no usher at our entrance and none of the groomsmen sat us. So I felt like a wedding crasher from the start. We didn’t even get a bulletin.

So we’re sitting there, and the service is very Catholic. I am not very Catholic; in fact I am not at all Catholic, so I had no idea what was going on. Catholic services are very nerve-wracking because periodically everyone responds with the same very loud phrase that you can’t decipher.

The man next to my mother gives her his bulletin, and she reads it and hands it to me. I look at the top, and there’s my name! I lean over to my mother, point to my name on the paper and say “Hell! That’s me! Let’s get outta here!” It was equally weird when the girl said my name during the vows.

The reception was at a high-falutin place with 4 open bars. Four. What food did they have, you ask? Well… crab cakes, egg rolls, meatballs, a candy buffet, croissant sandwiches, and many other things that I couldn’t see because people were going both ways on the food line. That is a cardinal wedding sin. You never go the wrong way on the food line, because then everyone else has to make accommodations for your ass-backwards understanding of wedding buffet egress. My theory is that everyone was plastered and they didn’t even know there was a line.

So I was trying to keep a low profile because I really wanted to leave. (We had to drive 2 hrs there and 2 hrs back… so I wanted to be on my way.) Well my mother goes over to the candy buffet. She didn’t even want to eat the candy, she just wanted to get one piece of the oddly shaped candy because she had to know what it was. After getting a couple pieces of the ones she wanted, I lean in and scoop a huge heap of themed M&Ms into her little box. She doesn’t really get mad or anything, but in order to get to the pieces she wants, she has to dig way down in the box with her fingers. I’m standing there telling her that I want to leave and offering several escape tactics when all of a sudden the bottom falls out of her candy box.

Crash! Candy bounces all over the floor. Everyone, and I mean everyone looks at us. The astronauts are looking at us because they hear the crash from the space shuttle. I am more embarrassed than ever. My mother, who doesn’t embarrass at all, just looks at me like “Oops.” So I’m desperately trying to think of a way to walk away without drawing attention to myself and making it look like I did it. So I cleverly say “I’ll go find a broom,” and I get the heck out of there.

We walk downstairs so that we can escape, and who walks in but the bride? I want to point and scream “NAME THIEF!” but instead I just look at my mother and say, “I think I’ll look at this plaque on the wall.” I turn to the plaque, and when that’s not enough to hide, I say “Let’s go have a cigarette,” to my mother. She says, “Great idea.” (Neither of us smoke.) Thus we can walk out, fumbling around in our purses, saying, can I use your lighter? periodically to each other, without the bride thinking that we are the wedding crashers we feel like.